Chapter 5: Sahelian Agroforestry: Institutional Considerations

What are the institutional problems involved in the design and
implementation of agroforestry programs in the Sahel? In this chapter we focus
on information and participation issues that must be addressed if agroforestry
extension programs are to work effectively. To this end, a checklist is provided
of potential constraints--technical, economic, financial, legal, and
political--that may impede or, in some settings, totally block efforts to
promote agroforestry. Program designers can begin tackling these issues early in
the project design stage, thus markedly reducing difficulties later when
agroforestry program personnel seek working rapport with farmers and herders,
who will inevitably carry the bulk of the day-to-day burden of Sahelian
environmental management. Forestry and agricultural agencies, which now are and
likely will remain material- and personnel-poor (Club du Sahel 1981, 1982a), can
at best only point the way toward better environmental management practices;
they can never apply them on any significant scale.

This chapter is divided into three sections: (1) an initial,
brief statement of the problem and general outline of a solution; (2) a review
of preliminary information useful to project planners who want to incorporate
into agroforestry programs institutional elements that encourage sustained
popular participation; and (3) design criteria for effective agroforestry
extension systems.

PROBLEM STATEMENT AND SOLUTION OUTLINES

Problem

The problem, in its simplest form, is how to establish working
agroforestry programs in arid areas. A "working' agroforestry program will
ensure environmental stabilization or improvement. It will also provide for an
increased flow of benefits from the environment to its major users--people and
livestock.

People will generally benefit if stock numbers and health levels
can be increased without damage to supporting environments. They will enjoy
increased access to livestock products, improved food crop production
efficiencies, and enhanced environmental capacity to supply fuel, construction
wood, and other forest products indispensable to their well-being. Chapter 3
offers a more elaborate definition of the potential range of outputs from an
effective agroforestry system.

A working agroforestry program as defined here assumes extensive
largely spontaneous popular participation in program-promoted activities Given
current and probable future staffing levels, neither agricultural and livestock
services nor their traditionally poorer colleagues in forestry departments can
hope to muster enough manpower to work individually with rural dwellers to
improve indigenous agroforestry techniques, let alone put those lessons into
practice throughout the vast Sahelian area. Wither rural people in the Sahel
will teach as well as do agroforestry or it will not be done.

"Doing agroforestry" is a complex task. It requires capability
and willingness to assess varied specific local conditions, field by field, and
then fled and implement solutions by associating trees with food crops and
pastures. The goal must be to lessen or overcome problems that rural dwellers
face in trying to maintain a fragile renewable resource base while, at the same
time, extracting from it the wherewithal to stay alive. An approach to the
detailed diagnosis and design of agroforestry systems based on East African
experience is described by Raintree in Appendix B.

Participation by rural people in agroforestry projects or
programs cannot be limited to simple execution of generalized strategies
recommended by experts. Sahelian conditions are too complex to admit of formula
solutions. Instead, pastoralists and farmers must be helped to build on what la,
frequently, a substantial existing local capital of agroforestry experience and
techniques. They will require assistance from local experts if they are to get
the most out of their environments consonant with sustained-yield use. But
experts, in turn, will require the willing and conscious participation of rural
people in thinking through agroforestry problems (Thomson 1980a). Those who till
the land and herd the animals must become full partners in any realistic effort
to create a working agroforestry system under Sahelian conditions.

To achieve the goal set out, experts and Sahelian foresters must
find ways to work with and through rural people. They can no longer permit
themselves the luxury of "purely technical operations, which by and large have
been dismal failures in terms of both cost effectiveness and environmental
management (Club du Sahel 1981, 1982a, 1982b). Implicit here is the need for an
extension service capable of promoting agroforestry under Sahelian conditions.

Approach to a Solution

This definition of the problem sets two requirements for a
solution. First, in order to interest rural people (who already lead a marginal
existence) in resource management, programs must appear to them as worthwhile
activities Second, solutions must be tailored to fit the contours, institutional
as well as natural, of local settings.

Solutions will involve people if the solutions promise net
benefits and do not overtax local resource bases or organizational capabilities
(Thomson 1980b). Institutional and natural characteristics of local settings are
clearly not immutable. But if renewable resource management is to depend on
increased external support for environmental management--for example, from donor
contributions--or on changes in the working rules of local life in thousands of
Sahelian communities, realism demands careful assessment of chances of success.
Planners will be well advised to think through proposed changes to determine
whether they can be effected and then sustained. If changes are feasible, in
terms of costs to the target group of resource managers--rural Sahelians--and in
terms of sustainability, both of new rules and levels of external funding, then
management of renewable resources in specific locations may become a reality. If
not, other approaches to stemming Sahelian environmental degradation must be
sought.

RELEVANT PRELIMINARY INFORMATION

Agroforestry planners will require three general kinds of
information: (1) baseline data on renewable natural resource availability, in
the context of control and use rules; (2) knowledge of people's attitude toward
desirability of managing particular renewable natural resources; and (3) clear
and precise understanding of factors constraining management of these resources.
State-of-the-art technical information on production levels associated with
realistic alternative mixes of trees, agricultural crops, and livestock is
necessary, in turn, to match with the on-site baseline data sets.

Baseline Data

Human activity is almost always patterned and takes place in
special, channeled ways in particular settings. Planners need to build up
detailed descriptions--word and number pictures--of what people are doing with
resources and how they are doing it, so they can analyze trends in resource use
with confidence and sophistication.

A number of general topics must be covered concerning each
resource if the global picture regarding trees, pastures, or soils--or
interactions between these and other renewable resources--is to be meaningful
and accurate. In general, the following areas must be covered (in some
situations, supplemental information on other topics will be indispensable):

1. Current availability of renewable natural resources by
district within the country. Of particular importance in the context of
agroforestry projects will be information on condition of the woodstock (all
ligneous plants, from small bushes to trees). Pasture' soil, water, and human
food supply conditions must also be investigated.

2. Probable evolution of supply and demand situation for each
resource in surplus, equilibrium, and deficit areas.

5. Existing management efforts designed to maintain or enhance
resource availability, be they private, local, and indigenous, or external,
government/donor-sponsored attempts.

6. Terms and conditions of access to and exploitation of
renewable resources both within and outside of management districts. These are
often heavily influenced by:

a. Formal rules--laws, administrative decrees, resource use
codes, association statutes, or "customary laws," and the like, which bear on
control and use of renewable natural resources.

b. Effective rules--determined by decisions of enforcing
officials and judicial authorities, concerning application of formal rules to
real instances of trouble and disputes (Thomson 1977, and literature cited there
by Commons, and Llewellyn and Hoebel).

Note that the effective rules may be the same as formal rules;
they may also diverge in small or large ways, depending on the extent to which
enforcers and Judicial officials enjoy leeway to determine, in individual
incidents, what the real law will be for that dispute. In the final analysis,
effective rules control and guide conduct: individuals make calculations
regarding resource use based mainly on what they think will happen if a dispute
arises, and less on terms of formal, paper rules.

Note further that "no rule" is still a rule; for example, a
forestry code may precisely define, on paper, terms of lawful access to certain
tree species, but the code provisions may never be enforced in some areas. In
such circumstances, the rule of access is generally "first come, first served,"
which implies that nothing will constrain resource use short of full exhaustion
of supplies. (In surplus supply situations, this may well be the most
appropriate--"reasonable and efficient"resource use rule.)

Information on these points should be collected whenever and
wherever efforts at resource management are to be mounted. In Sahelian
agroforestry programs, as noted, five types of renewable resources appear of
prime importance:

1. Woodstock2. Pastures3. Soils4. Water5. Human
food supplies

The assessment schema outlined above will be briefly illustrated
using an analysis of woodstock conditions; it can be similarly applied to the
other renewable resources.

Woodstock Assessment: An Illustration

Basic woodstock ecological sub-areas within the country must be
identified as a preliminary step. These sub-areas might include places where
bush cover still predominates, regions of interspersed fields and fallows,
permanent agriculture under a tree canopy of species such as Acacia albida or
Butyrospermum paradoxum, and areas of substantial deforestation.

Quality and quantity of remaining wood supplies, as well as the
kinds of pressures to which they are subjected (local and distant demand for
firewood and building poles, cutting for fodder and fencing, and so forth), must
then be precisely described. This information, combined with demand projections
from current consumption levels and population growth rates, will permit
assessment of probable future deficit areas. (Such projections, however, do not
alone Justify siting projects in probable deficit areas.)

User communities should be carefully canvassed about the
benefits they derive from the woodstock. On-site uses may include soil
regeneration and/or stabilization, erosion control and fencing, and consumptive
uses of products such as fuel, building materials, food crops, medicines, and
fencing. These data can be particularly helpful at the design stage if they
reveal hitherto neglected bargaining counters to promote conservation and
resource management.

Within each ecological sub-area, data should be gathered on
efforts to increase the woodstock in any of the following ways:

In each instance, accurate, detailed information about
sponsorship, initiation, management, and implementation of such efforts will
reveal the range of existing agroforestry activities and possible pitfalls of
different approaches.

Finally, the working rules of resource use should be identified.
IS there a forestry code? To what extent does it control access in a formal
sense, and how is it applied in fact, by area? Where an existing code is
irrelevant, because it is not enforced, what are the local rules governing tree
tenure or property rights regarding trees? Through what means can they be
enforced? Detailed information of this sort promotes real understanding, both of
peoples' attitudes toward resource management and of the hurdles they may
perceive in various management schemes.

Popular Interest in Resource Management

Popular willingness to invest time, energy, goods, and money in
renewable resource management critically conditions feasibility of participatory
resource management schemes. Villagers with little practical experience in
working together toward common goals over long periods of time will likely have
trouble managing a village woodlot held in common. Those accustomed to sustained
collective action may reject a program focused on improving individual farmers'
resource management capabilities. Planners and designers thus need to spend time
finding out how people organize to do things in the area of resource management.

A healthy dose of skepticism is in order when assessing
villagers' initial answers to the question, "How would you like to manage
resource X?" Village spokesmen may know that current government policy
emphasizes a particular format or way of working, for example, "collective
action," "individual initiative," "youth groups," "cooperatives," or "the
Party." Chances are good that villagers will "want" to manage resources in the
preferred manner, if only to avoid antagonizing government officials in the
short run. If the opening question runs, "Do you villagers want to organize a
collective woodlot?" any collective orientation villagers may express must be
viewed even more skeptically, since they will assume the government's preferred
format has been stated in the question itself. Even rephrasing the question to a
simple, neutral inquiry about the villagers' interest in managing resources at
all may not escape biased replies if spokesmen know there is a push on to
promote reforestation, for example.

To penetrate this frequently encountered protective smokescreen
of politically conditioned responses and get to the realities of village
organization, the investigator needs to find out how people carry out other
activities. Is farming--usually the fundamental activity in Sahelian rural
communities--largely an individually run activity? If there are cooperatives,
how well do they function? If trees have been planted in the village, or
terraces built on village fields, or if other forms of resource management have
been attempted, how were those efforts undertaken? Were they done collectively
or individually or by families who owned the property? What was the impetus for
the action? Did individuals or some sort of collective group in the village
decide, perhaps after consultation with outsiders, that they wanted to start
something in the realm of resource management; or did woodlots or rock dams or
windbreaks result from a government program imposed on villagers, or from
inducement provided by a donor-financed or private voluntary organization
project?

Once the general nature of resource management activities is
clear, designers will have an easier time assessing feasibility of different
organizational approaches to resource management. They should be able to
discount the facade of politically structured responses and, through careful
examination of real activities, arrive at a general sense of what will and what
will not work in a community.

Investigators, however, should be wary of concluding, from
collective or individual activities in areas other than resource management,
that the same orientations will automatically carry over into the resource
realm. Particularly if resource management has no prominent place in local
traditional activities, it would be wise to adopt a frankly experimental
orientation to the problem of organization and encourage villagers to try a
variety of approaches, each individual or group doing more or less as he, she,
or they see fit. It may also turn out that villagers are willing to manage
resources, but only when the task is imposed upon them, and when state officials
shoulder the burden of making sure each villager does his or her share. (For an
enlightening discussion of this type of problem in the context of land reform
efforts, see Popkin 1979:50-51, and literature cited there.) Where this is the
case, resource management operations will be limited by the size of the civil
service contingent that can be detached for such activities.

Constraints on Participatory Resource Management

Five general categories of constraints may impinge on resource
management efforts: technical, economic, financial, legal, and political.
(Thomson 1981:125-48, presents a more detailed formulation and illustrations of
these constraints.) Each will be examined and briefly illustrated by examples
from the area of woodstock management.

Technical constraints may inhere both in the environment and in
the particular species of trees or shrubs selected for use in reforestation
activities. In the Sahel, seedlings must be able to survive in the face of harsh
temperatures, irregular rainfall, and frequently poor soils (unless special
arrangements can be made to irrigate young plants). Some species, particularly
among the exotics, simply cannot survive under Sahelian conditions. They can be
planted; but as hundreds of stunted or failed Azadirachta indica (neem)
plantations attest, they will not necessarily prosper. In other cases, seeds or
seedlings of appropriate species may not be available at the right time.
Inadequate seed collection or production capacities may explain this and may be
remedied with relative ease, but the constraint nonetheless often exists.
Finally, genetically improved local species are not yet available. If the local
species' hardiness can be coupled with improved growth rates and production of
subsidiary forest products, popular interest in reforestation may well pick up
noticeably.

For many Sahelians, the idea of planting trees at present raises
as many problems as it solves. In certain cultures and agricultural settings,
farmers view trees with disfavor as unwelcome competition. Villagers may not yet
grasp the full range of values that shelterbelts or live fencing can provide,
although in many areas a very clear perception of the usefulness of certain
trees has existed for a long time. The extent to which Acacia albida and
Butyrospermum paradoxum have been promoted by rural people proves the point.
Adansonia digitata, Parkia clappertoniana, and other species have also been
widely cultured by Sahelians interested in their fruits and other by-products.

Finally, popular ignorance of silviculture operates in many
places as a factor constraining investment in renewing woodstocks. Many
Sahelians have much to learn about seed preparation methods, nursery techniques,
and methods and timing of planting. Some would also benefit greatly, as would
experts, from clearer appreciation of the values of certain local species, best
forms of association with crops and pasturelands, low-cost methods of promoting
natural regeneration, and the like. Popular education in silviculture has become
indispensable, as an important key to more intensive management of Sahelian
woodstocks. The extent to which many Sahelian cultures relied, until recently,
largely on passive investment in woodstock management, through systems of bush
fallowing or shifting cultivation, makes this educational undertaking doubly
pressing. The woodstock was allowed to take care of itself, under conditions
where it was rarely overexploited; in most places, it regenerated admirably on
the strength of almost entirely natural processes. Now, however, changing
land/man ratios impose the necessity for intensified silviculture. Drastic
reduction of bush areas, particularly when accompanied by severe, localized
environmental degradation, has sapped the efficacy of many passive regeneration
techniques. Rural dwellers in many places must now master new techniques if they
are to survive in their present habitats.

Economic constraints revolve around the question of
profitability of proposed improvement schemes. If farmers and herders can
demonstrate to their own satisfaction that investment in reforestation will pay
off, they can be expected to show more interest in the matter. In much of the
Sahel, active reforestation is, for all practical purposes, a new idea. It has
arisen only with the sharply decreased availability of firewood supply--a recent
phenomenon in many rural areas (and not as yet a universal one). But examples
already exist of individuals making money through investment in wood production
for market, and more are developing each year. This orientation will take time,
but sharply increasing prices of forest products throughout the Sahel guarantee
that activities that were irrelevant 10 years ago, when wood supplies remained
adequate in most places, will rapidly take on increased importance. It is
critical to capitalize on this rising current of popular interest, by putting
practical technical and economic solutions at people's disposal.

The development of markets for various kinds of wood, and price
increases that annually outstrip inflation (Club du Sahel 1981, 1982a, 1982b;
Winterbottom 1980), have convinced many Sahelians that they must provide for
their own consumptive needs on a systematic basis. The impetus to learn
tree-raising techniques sharpens as wood supplies dwindle and demand escalates
with growing populations. To the extent that technical innovations or newly
acquired silvicultural skills lower costs to rural people of investing in new
increments of wood supply (family or community woodlots, natural regeneration in
the fields, and so forth), multiplication of reforestation activities at the
local level throughout the Sahel become possible and indeed probable.

Financial constraints depend mainly on the cost of reforestation
rocesses. Land, labor, and materials may all be scarce items in different
Sahelian settings, particularly where intensifying population pressure has
confirmed labor migration as a standard response to food shortages.
Reforestation techniques that demand a substantial labor component may be beyond
the capacity of local communities to provide when able-bodied young people have
gone elsewhere in search of work. Complicating the problem are traditional labor
bottlenecks during the rainy season, when many critical reforestation actions
must succeed each other in timely fashion.

Evolving popular mastery of silvicultural techniques, as well as
improvement in techniques themselves, may eventually alleviate if not fully
resolve these problems. Anything that shifts the burden of investment in
reforestation from the rainy to the dry season seems positive in this regard.
Promoting natural regeneration appears especially promising here.

Inadequate credit arrangements may also hinder popular
reforestation attempts. Manufactured fencing materials such as barbed wire,
chicken wire, and posts may eventually Justify initial outlays in some
circumstances, but most people will remain too poor to envisage such purchases.
Subsidized loans and forest product price rises may sharply modify this
situation in the medium term, but in the short and long runs, solutions will
more likely be found through improvement in live-fencing techniques. This may
involve both enhanced popular awareness of the possibilities of live fencing and
a greater mastery, at the local level, of nursery techniques. Species that will
meet several additional needs, such as human and animal food production,
firewood, and building materials, and that will provide fencing and fencing
materials in the form of a reliable local source of thorns, ought to facilitate
enclosure. At that point, problems of stock control may become somewhat less
pressing.

Legal constraints will be embedded in the effective rules,
whether these closely reflect formal rule provisions or some quite different
local arrangement. Where property relations are ambiguous, either regarding land
or tree tenure, investors will be cautious. In the particularly discouraging
case of the improperly enforced state forestry code--these codes in the Sahel
usually provide for management and control of woodstock use by foresters--trees
may be treated as an unmanaged common property resource in which each individual
is, in effect, free to take what he wants without fearing that sanctions will be
imposed. Under such circumstances, investment in reforestation must strike most
rural dwellers as nonsense; they correctly see little probability that they will
reap any benefits from their work,

The legal process concerning enforcement of tree-tenure
relations is also critical. If "available" recourses, such as finding and
informing the roving forester of a code infraction on one's land, are
prohibitively expensive, they will not be invoked. If they are not invoked,
rules will not be enforced, and common property woodstocks will not be managed.

In each case, however, it is important to identify local working
rules governing woodstock use and management, and to do so before attempting to
propose projects or programs envisaging investment, in any form, in woodstock
management. In areas where a formal forestry code is not applied, local working
rules will determine, either actively or passively, how wood is exploited and to
some extent whether investment in reforestation is reasonable' (in places where
supply remains adequate, investment in new increments will find little favor
with rural Sahelians, whom experience has convinced of the virtues of passive
management, that is, regular fallowing and nothing more).

Political constraints turn on villagers' or herders' incapacity
to control local or outside exploiters of renewable resources and on the
inability, widespread in Sahelian states, of local communities both to formulate
and modify their own renewable resource management rules in light of changing
conditions, and also to enforce them regularly, as a framework for management
activities. These problems relate to larger political issues, such as
inter-ethnic relations and rural development, which public officials,
particularly in francophone areas, have tended to handle until very recently as
problems amenable to control only through extension of government networks (for
detailed illustrations of these points in the Nigerian context, see Thomson, in
press). In very recent years costs of this strategy, and its considerable
limitations, have become increasingly apparent to most observers familiar with
the reality of government- and donor-financed rural development projects. The
growing sense that decentralization must occur, in close association with
efforts to enable local communities to deal with such issues as resource
management, is certainly promising for future renewable resource management.

In summarizing this section, it must be stressed that
information about resource availability by local area, popular attitudes toward
management of different resources, locally preferred strategies for managing
resources, and social or institutional constraints on management activities is
often hard to come by. It is, in other words, high-priced information. Some data
will be so expensive as to preclude obtaining them in adequate amounts through
donor-financed personnel.

The secondary position is then to create an extension system
that uses local peoples' knowledge in these areas to reduce the costs of
gathering information. But such participation will not be without cost. It will
inevitably complicate and slow planning processes and make implementation of
management activities more cumbersome, at least initially. But basing planning
and execution on solid, reliable information about local circumstances should
make agroforestry programs much more effective over the long run.

AGROFORESTRY EXTENSION

The three types of preliminary information Just
discussed--baseline data on renewable natural resource availability, ownership,
and use rules; information about popular interest in managing particular
resources; and constraints that may complicate management of these
resources--will indicate areas where severe environmental degradation has
occurred, and where popular management opportunities might be identified and
developed. To realize and capitalize on these potential opportunities, a working
system of communication with villagers must be established.

Extension System Design Criteria

The term "extension system" may imply to some a one-way,
top-down flow of information from experts to farmers and herders. If so, the
term is inadequate. In this chapter, "extension system" is defined as a
reliable, two-way communication system. Information flowing in both directions
will be critical to the process of pinpointing difficulties at all levels in
resolving resource management problems: rural dwellers' intimate knowledge of
their own microenvironments, as well as experts' knowledge of genetic
engineering, plant compatibilities, soil conditions, and resource management
techniques that have worked elsewhere, will prove indispensable to effective
management efforts.

Messages moving through the extension system must also reflect
local people's knowledge of their social, economic, legal, political, and
organizational circumstances. These factors have as much to do with
environmental stabilization and upgrading as do nursery skills and the latest
technical advances. Local people are the ones who can most efficiently calculate
what will and what will not work for them in resource management. In exactly the
same way, they can best put to the acid field test experimental-station
hypotheses and results about appropriate plant associations, resource
conservation schemes, planting techniques, and 60 forth. In both the technical
and social realms, villagers and pastoralists, because they must grapple with
specifics of complex local environments, go beyond the generalizations that
often underlie experts management propositions toe test whether an idea or
process will work here. If extension systems £unction properly, they will
encourage farmers and herders and help them to tailor solutions in light of what
they know about limiting factors in their environments. Through such
participation, modifications in general formulas necessary to make them
effective in a given environment can be introduced.

Existing Extension Possibilities

Content, form, and process will interact in a developing
agroforestry extension system. Some information (content) can be transmitted
through almost any set of extension institutions; but how valuable that
information will appear to clientele, and what use they will make of it, will
depend very much on the form of the extension system (its institutional design)
and the communication process associated with it.

Program designers can roughly determine fairly early what they
want an agroforestry extension system to do. The task can be as simple and
specific as "teach people how to plant and care for nursery-raised neem
seedlings properly." It can be as complex as the following. First, find out what
people are interested in doing, by region (or by district, village, or family).
Depending on circumstances, they may want to plant nursery-raised seedlings of
various types. They might prefer to learn how to raise seedlings of their own
choice. They might want to start at the beginning, by learning how to collect,
grade, prepare, and plant seeds. On the other hand, they might like to learn how
to intensify production of natural regenerator, or to acquire new soil and water
conservation techniques based on agroforestry principles. Once the basic
interests of particular groups or individuals have been identified through a
careful dialogue, the second step will be to find out, in detail, what they
already know about these activities. Third, extension workers can proceed to
teach them more of what they want and need to know, while simultaneously making
them aware of other possibilities which they can examine for feasibility in
light of their knowledge of local conditions. Finally, the extension system
should provide materiel back-up for extension activities, whether it be in the
form of hand tools, fencing materials, or facilities for regional or local
experimental stations, agroforestry resource centers, and so forth. (For a
discussion of what such centers might attempt, see National Research Council
1981:87-92. Note that materiel back-up should also be provided to extension
workers, in part as encouragement and in part to permit them to do their Job
better.)

These kinds of mayor orientations or definitions of extension
system goals will then permit designers to move to the next step of evaluating
existing extension possibilities. In some settings it may be possible to graft
agroforestry extension efforts onto existing communications systems that have
been established, for instance, by forestry, agricultural, or livestock
agencies, or by individual rural development projects. This would be
particularly effective if existing extension workers could receive supplemental
training, enabling them to appreciate the complexities of integrated
agroforestry systems. To determine whether the use of existing extension systems
is advisable in a given place, three questions must be asked concerning
communication:

1. What messages are being transmitted by existing systems and
in what directions?2. Row well are they being passed?3. To what extent
can additional messages to farmers and pastoralists be effectively moved through
these networks?

Answers to these questions, coupled with data acquired through
preliminary investigations outlined above, will suggest whether new information
exchange systems focused on promoting agroforestry ought to be created and, if
so, where. This will be a very subtle process, particularly where some positive
agroforestry programs are already under way. Planners will have to identify
target areas on an experimental basis. Choices should reflect the need for
resource management, popular demand for information about improved agroforestry
methods, and political opportunities in light of other programs already
functioning in given Jurisdictions.

Agroforestry Extension Systems

Whether a policy decision is made to work through existing
systems or to develop a new set of institutions specifically designed to foster
popular agroforestry, it will be important to devise a series of working
hypotheses to be tested in experimental and implementation phases. These
hypotheses should help program designers, project personnel, and outside
evaluators to monitor activities and results and to clarify the value of
original formulations. Where correction becomes necessary, modifications in
hypotheses should be introduced but in a conscious manner. Projections must be
made about how extension tasks can be accomplished, formulated as working
hypotheses. It also is necessary to determine to what extent--and by what means
of evaluation of results--these hypotheses will be confirmed or rejected.

Several hypotheses are proposed here as possible models to be
adopted or adapted by future forestry programs. They also provide a summation of
points made in this chapter.

1. Agroforestry extension systems must, to succeed, encourage
local people both to implement positive resource management techniques and to
experiment with them, using indigenous systems where applicable, and outside
expertise or an amalgam of both where such knowledge is appropriate.

2. Systems that provide the greatest increase in resource
productivity for a given investment, or a given improvement in resource
productivity for the least investment, will be most successful,

a. Most farmers and pastoralists live fairly marginal existences
in difficult environments; they can afford only limited investments.

b. If actively promoting natural regenerator of vegetation
proves the least expensive approach, it should be explored intensively and
extensively.

3. To get wide and in-depth coverage of target populations,
extension networks will have to involve farmers and pastoralists as teachers of
their fellows. This implies some sort of training program. A CILSS seminar,
sponsored by the Agency for International Development, has produced specific
recommendations for Sahelian countries and has outlined an agroforestry
curriculum. An informal but sustained education program might well be best, if
it could be united with some form of regular, ongoing activity.

4. The vehicle that might carry extension messages and
information flows from individual field experiments to higher levels and,
inversely, might be a mini-nursery program designed to transfer knowledge about
nursery techniques to (self-selected) villagers, and through their efforts, to
make seedling stock easily available at the local level. If nurserymen were
allowed to sell their produce as well as their advice on promoting natural
regeneration and other forms of renewable resource management, they would have a
constant incentive to perform well in order to attract and hold a clientele.

5. Given the public good expected from effective agroforestry
extension work--environmental stabilization or improvement--it would be
appropriate to subsidize network members where this proved necessary to keep
them operating and moving ahead. Such individuals should not, however, become
fully paid state or project employees, since this would reduce their economic
incentive to be responsive to their clientele.

6. If extension networks associated with mini-nursery programs
could be tied in directly with regional agroforestry "learning and experimental
centers," local extension agents would have a point of contact with experts
capable of answering their resource management questions either from their own
knowledge, or by contacting others who could, or by devising experiments at the
center or elsewhere to generate answers.

7. Such a resource management extension system should be
designed to produce a continuous flow of feedback to the agroforestry learning
and experimental center about local resource management problems, successes, and
failures, and to identify the best opportunities by area to develop resource
management techniques in light of preliminary information and the outcomes of
subsequent
activities.